A 17 year-old student won a Canadian national science fair award for researching whether an herb best known as an ingredient in root beer could help fight cancer.Since the 1960's, sassafras, the primary root beer flavor, has been banned as carcinogenic by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after tests showed correlations between extreme consumption of sassafras and increased cancer levels in mice. As a result, sassafras can no longer be sold in the US. Root beer makers have been using artificial flavors or other alternatives to flavor root beer.

In a surprising twist, 17year-old Jennifer Wang discovered that another common root beer ingredient, sarsaparilla, does appear to be effective in stopping the growth of cancerous cells.